I think the complaint there isn't about the actual hack he succeeded at but more likely the part where he got everyone riled up and donating money to fight sony in court, but then backed out at the last second and agreed to settle. Unless the poster is one of the idiots that thinks geohot had anything to do with the attacks on PSN, in which case he's an idiot.

Right, there was the original hack that he alleged to have succeeded at which he refused to release that led Sony to remove the OtherOS feature to batten down the hatches, then the most recent key that was 90% other people's work which helped to damage the homebrew scene. Then there was him giving up pretty much immediately when being sued, even after many people donated money to hopefully establish precedence.

Consequently he gets no sympathy from me and deserves to be treated like scum. FB is just the plac

It's not a biased comment, he revealed a "hack" then refused to release it even as Sony locked down the console from legitimate uses. Then he took work done by others to finish releasing the key and finally when sued he folded like a house of cards, even after people had donated specifically for him to fight the suit. At bare minimum he should have personally repaid the donations.

The only "hack" I can recall him coming up with was that if found if you solder a special device onto the motherboard and activated at the right moment, you could sometimes access a tiny bit of hypervisor memory from OtherOS. I don't know if he ever fully released that information or not, but it's not important - it went nowhere, fail0verflow cracked it before he did anything more. That was the "work done by others"; it's not really relevant, because with the information fail0verflow had already released an

Well, I'd imagine he has quite a bit of lawyer bills to pay right now so a good paying job is probably a good idea for him. I don't see how you would think it equates to working for Sony. Facebook didn't take him to court.

They're saying that he is going to be working on the iOS app, so at least he is doing something he knows. After thinking about it, I'm surprised something like this didn't happen sooner. He knows iOS pretty well, it only makes sense that he would get a job somewhere making apps for it, and Facebook is one of the bigger companies with a more hacker friendly attitude.

True. And if anyone knows how to bypass your phone's security settings and get your contact list or anything else it wants, then he's probably the man as well. Not that Facebook would be interested in violating your privacy or anything.

Hacking iOS and hacking the PS3 is quite different from developing end-user apps for it.

They both require coding skills, and knowledge about software - yet when creating an app you're supposed to follow the guidelines, add a nice looking UI to it, etc. I see coding as a tool, no more. A tool to get something done. Building an app with nice UI means you need some UI skills. Building an app that hacks the underlying OS means you have crypto and system analyses skills.

I'm writing an app for Android myself, but I don't know much about the technicalities of Android under the hood, nor do I see much of a need for anyone to deeply understand the OS. Google has nicely abstracted that for me through their API kit. No need to know how memory is allocated exactly, or how and when an app is closed automatically (other than knowing it may happen).

I'd more expect this guy to end up in the computer security field.

But as you say, the pay is probably good. Very good. It has to be for someone with such skills.

No, Facebook's privacy settings are, from the POV of Facebook, excellent. They give the illusion of privacy to encourage people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. Which is the entire point - FB is less about providing a place to meet, but more a place to get people to willingly post information online to for data mining purposes.

If you think hardware-level or deep OS-level knowledge isn't important to coding effectively, you need to read a little. Especially on mobile platforms, the trick is getting every ounce of power out of the CPU. And no one said he went into UI development. If anything, the team that handles that does so across all platforms so that the aesthetic is the same throughout Facebook products. Lastly, the security he broke wasn't anything that most consumer-level electronics bother with. The PS3 was so heavily lock

When talking games, yes, then you need every last bit of performance out of what you can get (though if you go that way, your app will suck on lower-specced models). Then those optimisations may come in handy.

However I don't see why a Facebook app would be limited by available hardware as basically all it does is send and receive messages, and display them in a nice way. No need for fancy animations or so. Network speed will be your limiting factor.

Hacking iOS and hacking the PS3 is quite different from developing end-user apps for it.

They both require coding skills, and knowledge about software - yet when creating an app you're supposed to follow the guidelines, add a nice looking UI to it, etc. I see coding as a tool, no more. A tool to get something done. Building an app with nice UI means you need some UI skills. Building an app that hacks the underlying OS means you have crypto and system analyses skills.

I'm writing an app for Android myself, but I don't know much about the technicalities of Android under the hood, nor do I see much of a need for anyone to deeply understand the OS. Google has nicely abstracted that for me through their API kit. No need to know how memory is allocated exactly, or how and when an app is closed automatically (other than knowing it may happen).

I'd more expect this guy to end up in the computer security field.

But as you say, the pay is probably good. Very good. It has to be for someone with such skills.

many mobile apps suck simply because they've been made exactly according to guidelines (which don't fit the program at all, like default android youtube player pausing when it goes out of focus). and you actually need to know on android where and how memory is allocated and what shenigans about app process life cycle are happening behind your back, you have to know what stuff you'd like to keep alive in memory and which you'd be happy to let go to the gc, to speed up switching back to the app - and by spe

Just because you don't like company A, and you don't like company B, doesn't mean that someone else working for B is like him working for A from his perspective.

My understanding is that the distaste for Sony came from it trying to lock out developers and hackers who wanted to put their own stuff into the PS3 ecosystem. Facebook lets developers in*, the developers are just not allowed to take users out.

* Seriously; it seems every third week,at some point navigating to facebook.com lands me on some kind of phishing page or scam poll. It'd be a lot easier for FB to avoid that kind of vulnerability if they were far more draconian about developer access.

My best guess is that some people I have as contacts on FB are more prone than yours to trying dozens of new apps each week, and so I'm at a greater risk.

I've gotten the same reaction from other people, and it wasn't until they were standing behind me when it happened that they believed me. When the same kind of things happens once in a while across three browsers over two different operating systems across five or six different machines over three or four ISPs, I'm pretty sure it's not a local virus or bi

I greatly prefer logging into their website using a mobile browser than using that god awful app.

I actually tried installing a Facebook app over the weekend... it more or less wanted to completely change all of my privacy settings, which I assume is a side effect of the way the platform APIs work.

So, if my choice is to use Safari to access Facebook, or let some app change all of my privacy settings to be much more permissive than I wanted... well, it's not like it's tough to use it in Safari.

Thanks for raising the alarm. My settings are still on the Friends only for most and private for a few others so I'm not sure what you did that made it want to change your settings. But really thanks. It usually takes some kind of reminder for me to go in there and check to make sure facebook hasn't once again done a dodgy.

He's a douchebag sellout, and he's using his talents to further facebook's privacy invasion agenda. He lost all respect from me.

I'm not sure I get the Slashdot outrage against 'privacy invasion" at a site you choose to post stuff, vs. the automatic, non-opt-in extensive data gathering Google is doing on you across their services and advertising network (and cars).

Maybe I'm too old-fashioned about such things, but Facebook is severely ethically challenged as a company. By extension, anybody who can work there without vomiting blood from disgust at their employer's behavior is not somebody I would want to hire.

I see why you took my comment that way. I don't think Facebook is inherently evil. I do think they don't care much about their users. My comment was a more generic response to the gp. Ethical stands tend to go out the window with enough cash on the table.

Potential Employee: I don't like your company's ethical position.

Employer: The dump truck with your money is headed to your house, should he just dump it in your pool?

Well, one glance at Sony should answer that question... when was the last time they did something innovative? They make a bunch of second-tier me-too products, from TVs to cameras to MP3 players to phones, but they haven't had a really market leading product since what, the discman? How many people in high school these days would even know what one is?

So there's your answer: when an innovating company's best minds are in legal, they cease to be an innovating company.

"Wasn't the skinny on geohot that all he did was use other people's work and never really had any real skill or ability?"

Absolutely not, no.

While he was not the only one responsible for the ps3 hacks, he did do one or two things that nobody else has managed to replicate (or nobody has managed to replicate and then disclose anyway). It's one of the reason a variety of scene people are pissed off at him. He built on some of the breakthroughs by other folks but didn't release details of his own insights, just

Don't really know too much about him, but I thought all his work up until now has been with hardware? Doesn't really make sense to me that Facebook would hire him for 'anything', much less product development.
Developing an process to circumvent security measures is worlds apart from developing a product for end consumers. If anything, every hardware developer should be trying to hire him for QA. But good for him for striking while the iron is still hot and landing a job while people still know who he is.

He probably looks like the guy in the Geohot video that he released. And probably has the same first and last name as Geohot. And if that stuff wasn't enough, he could always show them some documentation from getting his socks sued off by Sony.